Guide

In Citrix Receiver 4.11 there is a new feature for Improved Control Over the Remote Language Bar for Seamless Published Applications (See https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX231913 ). This is especially for us here in Switzerland nice and important as we have four official spoken languages and also different Keyboard layouts. There is German, French, Italian and Romansh. Romansh is more or less neglected but beside German the languages French and Italian play a significant role.

As I plan to roll out the Receiver 4.11 in my company, my aim is to keep the possibility open for the user for configure that on receiver, but I want to have a pre-defined setting. By the way, earlier we always hid the Language bar by making use of the SeamlessFlags (on server side). But I experienced that this had in Server 2016 a negative impact to the logon time, don’t ask me why … But it’s a fact and i’s reproducible so I keep the Language bar visible and now I’m very happy that this is configurable in Receiver.

Intro – my relationship with Windows 10

The company I’m working for, Die Mobiliar, started early with Windows 10, we rolled out in spring 2016 Windows 10 to all our physical devices and also to our virtual Desktops. We have two different kind of VDIs, pooled Win10 Desktops provided by Citrix PVS and also classical installed dedicated VDIs. Both with Citrix XenDesktop 7.x.

To be in the role as early-adopter with such a new operating systems is interesting but also nerve-racking on some days… Especially when you add Citrix XenDesktop on top to Windows 10 and then also special requirements like physical and virtual Smart Cards.
I talked about this adventure on E2EVC in Rome: The stony road of a VDI migration from Win7 to Win10

Next chapter

Now our story goes into the next round, we installed Windows 10 last year with the 1511 Release and we want to go now to the anniversary update (1607). For our pooled desktops it’s no question, fresh install on the new build. But an fresh install of the dedicated desktops where users have installed their own stuff will get me into big troubles … it’s really not an option!

I was curious who is in the same boat, so I created this poll:

36% are doing fresh install of dedicated desktops? Wow … BOFH? 🙂

I tell you now 2 secrets:

It’s not possible to update Windows 10 from one version to the other when a Citrix Virtual Desktop Agent (VDA) is installed!

Uninstall of Citrix VDA fails most of the times!
Good News: Citrix knows that uninstall of the VDA is a problem, for that reason there exists the
VDACleanupUtility.exe (https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX209255)Bad News: VDACleanupUtility.exe (VCU) should run as a User, need a reboot and login with the same user, what means it’s not in a easy way to automate that.

With some hints of the CTP colleague Stephane Thirion and my collegues at “Die Mobiliar” I was able to create this guide to automate the Windows 10 Update with an automated removal of the VDA.

Task Sequence for SCCM

We are doing this with Microsoft System Center but with the following infos it’s also possible to fulfil this challenge with other ESDs.

Upgrade Steps – Overview

The Citrix VDI specific things highlighted in yellow, in this guide I’ll focus on that. We are using one task sequence to update all our Windows 10 installation, thats the reason we need to made a decision if the installation is a VDI or not.

After the OS upgrade we just install the VDA again with our existing software package.

Because the Windows upgrade kills the Citrix receiver we also re-install the receiver at the end.

The really hard part is the proper automated removal from the VDA, and thats where I go a bit into the deep in this article.

VDI or not – thats the question
Because we will use one TaskSequence for Win10 with and whiteout Citrix VDA we just check if the VDA is installed, we are doing that by query the Key which has been written by the Software package for VDA

A reboot to start is always smart

Sometimes the VDACleanupUtility ask for a reboot, it’s good to start with a reboot before any other steps are done.

first step of the VDA removal

The VDACleanupUtility should be started in silent mode and with a suppressed reboot:

cmd /c VDACleanupUtility.exe /silent /noreboot

The VDACleanupUtility.exe is the only thing in the Package you see on the screenshot.

Remove an action which would be done after the suppressed reboot in order of the VCU

this time with the switch silent and reboot – reboot doesn’t mean that it will do a reboot, it’s just the info for VCU that it’s now in phase after the reboot

cmd /c VDACleanupUtility.exe /silent /reboot

Now do all the Windows Upgrade steps you want to do,
here you also need to think about drivers or in virtualized environments XenTools, VMwareTools, etc.

As a next Step install the VDA again

Re-install the Citrix Receiver

Update of Win10 will destroy your Citrix Receiver installation, for this reason install it again at the end

I want to thank here to Stephane Thirion (https://www.archy.net) for the hints about automate the uninstall of the VDA. Also thanks to my colleagues Stefan Moser and Thomas Hahnel at Die Mobiliar with more Knowhow about SCCM Task Sequences and patience on testing.

Update Fall 2017:

The Version of the Cleanup tool in September 2017 is able to run in unattend mode, see https://support.citrix.com/article/CTX209255 .
Also I’ve found out that the Update from 1607 to 1703 or 1709 works even when a VDA is installed.

When I started to work with Remote Desktop stuff back in 2001 there was one thing definitely not possible, watch a video over a remote connection – not even with Citrix … in the last years a lot of things changed and Citrix improved their protocols and Video codecs from version to version. Today you can do awesome things over a remote connection with Citrix. There are many blogs and articles which shows what’s possible, also for GPU mapping 3D stuff and so on … this blog doesn’t describe how you can get the awesome 3D things out from your VDI. It’s more what if you don’t have special requirements for 3D, you don’t have time to test all possibilities, no time to tune, but you want have the best result according to the Pareto principle.

What do you configure? Nothing? Just default, because default is the setting which will fit for most Users?

Are you aware that default setting on XenApp/XenDesktop until VDA 7.9 was Thinwire with H.264 and since VDA 7.9 it’s Thinwire Plus (Compatibility Encoder)?
You need to consider this fact before you upgrade from 7.x to 7.9! Why they changed that? Is Thinwire Plus better? No! Is Thinwire H.264 better? No!
It’s just different! What are the differences? What I need to choose? It depends! But on what?

This blog post is mainly a comparison between Thinwire Plus and Thinwire H264 !

I’ve done a survey what is preferred for the codec on twitter, funny result 50% vs 50%:

I’ve started some tests, also with the Pareto principle, so no deep scientific background! I tested an internal video in our Intranet of 53 seconds and 1 minute of a YouTube video, Big Buck Bunny, with 25 fps, set to 720p in YouTube. I had an eye on the user experience, means fragments, fluent movie, lip-sync and on the other side on the resource consumption like CPU and bandwidth.

(Advice if you like to do your own tests, Big Buck Bunny is nice to impress people but if you want test for lip-sync take an other movie … the Bunny doesn’t talk much …. )

For this tests I used the best, or the only one tool on the market to analyze remote display stuff, the Remote Desktop Analyzer from
Bram Wolfs and Barry Schiffer. In version 1.4 you can do some very helpful statistic reports:

I have tested with:

Virtual Desktop:

Windows 10, VDA 7.9, 2 vCPU, 4 GB Memory, virtualized on VMWare ESX.

Video Codecs:

Thinwire +

Thinwire with H264

Client:

Mac OSX

Windows 10

HDX Raspberry Pi

and thank you to René Bigler (Twitter @dready73 ) to test with those clients:

ChromeBook

Linux ThinClient (IGEL)

And this are our Results:

My personal conclusion:

If you have clients like ChromeBook or Windows who can manage H.264 this is your way to go. With limited H264 on the end device you run better with Tw+.

I work in a company which has internal only Windows 10 client devices but from external we have users with BYOD, and MacBooks are not a minority. For this reason I set a Citrix Policy which set all connection not coming over Netscaler to Tw with H.264. So we have internal the best result and external still a good result over the average. What would be the best, is when it’s possible to set a Citrix Policy according to the Client OS which connects.

Because I have currently holiday here is another post which is not related to virtualization …

I combined my new “gadgets” the LaMetric time and my new wifi Smart-Plug from MyStrom. The goal was to report the current power consumption of power plug and the possibility to control the plug with the smart ticker.

MyStrom has a very straight forward API (https://mystrom.ch/en/mystrom-api), and the possibility to create apps for LaMetric is pretty easy what I’ve already mentioned in an past blog post.

The hidden release of UPM 5.3, the finding of today … 2 days ago the Feature Pack 3 for XenApp & XenDesktop which contains the new Citrix Virtual Desktop Agent which should support Windows 10 .

I replaced the VDA Tech Preview with this Version on my Win 10 VDI. In my updating fever I also tried to update it on my Win7 VDIs, and wow, I found out that it contains a new version of Profile Manager, version 5.3!

Problem: I want to solve my profile issues but I cannot install FP3 VDA because of this issue.

Erik Bakker (@bakker_erik) gave me the great hint to unzip the VDA Source (VDAWorkstationSetup_7.6.300.exe or the vdaserversetup.exe) to extract the files needed for UPM 5.3. Thanks!

Installation of UPM 5.3 also appears on appwiz.cpl

So if you are in a similar situation like I was this is a possible way to get early a UPM 5.3 installation without the need to update the VDA. But keep in mind, this is a dirty hack an I’m pretty sure that it wouldn’t be supported from Citrix … All what you do, you do on your own risk. Possibly there’s a reason that UPM 5.3 is not yet officially released … see http://discussions.citrix.com/topic/371286-profile-management-53

Update: Seems there are Issues with UPM 5.3 on Windows 10, I propose to wait with the installation of 5.3.

Avoid the Jetlag when coming from overseasMy personal best method to avoid the Jetlag (Switzerland, Europe to Florida, US -6 hours):

I will arrive early, even Synergy starts on the 13th, I take already the plane on the 9th of May. That gives me some days to get in the correct day/night rhythm.

I stay waked up after arrival until my normal sleeping time, even if I’m very tired!

If I wake up in the middle of the first night because it’s morning in Europe (and in my day/night rhythm), I’ll take a soft Sleep Aid called MidNite, available in a lot of US Stores (e.g. CVS).

I get up after sunrise an go outside to the Sun to let my inner day/night rhythm know thats now day.

Stay online without expensive mobile roaming costs!Instead of the Net10 card what is mentioned in the blog of Neil spellings I will buy a AT&T GoPhone Prepaid Card with e.g. 2GB for 25$ and I put it in my Huawei E5372. If you intend to use an other device or provider be aware of the used frequencies. This combination gives you a Mobile Hotspot which works in thr US with AT&T and Europe on 2G/3G and 4G mobile network.

Plan your sessionsYou can plan the Sessions you want to attend on the Synergy Session Catalog Website . If you are already registered for Synergy you can login with your Synergy account subscribe to the sessions you like to attend (first come first served, no possibility to reserve the seats with exception of the 99$ Pre-event Training Workshop). and afterwards you can download a PDF with all your sessions or you can download the Calendar-Files.

Plan Meetings!

After login to your Synergy Account you have the possibility for an Attendee Search and request meetings:

Try to meet people you known today just virtual from twitter or from a blog to get a face behind of a URL or a Username.

If you register for Citrix Synergy and like this post or this blogPlease use my referral code in the registration:

If you are from Central & Eastern Europe join the snacks, beer and networking eventCheck your Mailbox, and the Spam-Folder about an invitation from Dirk Pfefferle, to a “evening together with Citrix Central & Eastern Europe Team”. I just found in my Spam folder an invitation for this snacks, beer and networking event.